Ending Fight for U.N. Seat, Guatemala and Venezuela Back Panama

By SIMON ROMERO

Published: November 2, 2006

Venezuela and Guatemala agreed Wednesday to withdraw from their race for a seat on the United Nations Security Council and to support Panama as a candidate. Their agreement ended a drawn-out contest that had shown the limits of the efforts by the Venezuelan president, Hugo Ch?z, to find a prominent platform for his views.

Diego Cordovez, Ecuador's ambassador to the United Nations, announced in New York the choice of Panama as a consensus candidate to represent the region, after weeks of voting that began Oct. 16. The compromise came after 47 rounds of voting in the United Nations in which neither Guatemala nor Venezuela attained the two-thirds majority of the 192-member General Assembly needed for the seat.

''This is moment of isolation for Venezuela on the world stage,'' said Milos Alcalay, a former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Ch?z, who resigned in 2004, saying the government was violating democratic principles. ''The democratic left in Latin America was becoming alienated by Venezuela's militaristic language.''

Venezuelan diplomats had positioned the race largely as a contest between Mr. Ch?z's foreign policy and that of the Bush administration, describing efforts by the United States to support Guatemala's candidacy as ''gross blackmail.'' The presidents of Bolivia and the Dominican Republic said they had been approached by Venezuelan officials as possible alternatives.

Still, officials here have been describing the episode as a victory illustrating the capacity of a developing country to stand up to the ''empire,'' as the United States is frequently called in Venezuelan government circles. ''Ch?z will try to find a way to use this to his favor,'' said Elsa Cardozo, a political analyst at the Central University of Venezuela. ''This is not a government looking to become more moderate.''

Venezuela agreed with Syria and Iran on Wednesday to build a $1.5 billion oil refinery in Syria. Venezuela has been strengthening ties with the two Middle Eastern countries, in addition to other nations on the fringe of American influence like Belarus and Cuba, in an effort to counter the power of the United States.

While Venezuela's effort to win the seat for a nonpermanent member of the United Nations Security Council illustrated the limits of Mr. Ch?z's international ambitions, it also showed how Venezuela had been able to cement regional alliances. While the balloting was secret, news reports have said that South American countries like Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, which have increasingly important commercial ties with Venezuela, supported Mr. Ch?z.

Most Caribbean countries also reportedly voted in favor of Venezuela, following intensive efforts by Mr. Ch?z's government to extend its exports of oil on favorable terms to countries in the region.

A turning point against Venezuela's effort to win the seat seemed to come during a speech by Mr. Ch?z at the United Nations in September, when he ridiculed Mr. Bush as the devil. That comment appeared to influence some of the diplomats who decided to vote for Guatemala. Still, Mr. Ch?z's description of Mr. Bush played well with many people in Venezuela, where wariness over the tacit approval by the United States of the brief coup that ousted Mr. Ch?z in 2002 has pervaded relations between the two countries.

Sometimes relations tilt toward the surreal. The National Assembly, which is controlled by Mr. Ch?z's supporters, recently called on the Bush administration to explain why it had carried out the attack on the World Trade Center.